For the last week I have been in Melbourne undergoing training for the RH436 course and exam.

I am pleased to announce that I have passed the exam, and have now added the RH436 endorsement to my existing RHCE qualification!

For those who are unfamiliar with Redhat’s courses, the RH436 course is one of the 5 main components of the Redhat Certified Architect qualification, which is another level above RHCE.

RH436 is a 4-day course which covers clustering and storage management. This includes the following technologies:

• RAID/LVM
• device-mapper
• udev
• Redhat Cluster Suite
• GFS (a clustered filesystem)

The main reason I was interested in clustering was for automated failovers, and it is clear that Redhat have put together a powerful distribution for clustering.

An example application is for running a mission-critical website. With a cluster, you can setup multiple nodes/servers, and in the event of a failure, the website service will be automatically moved to another node, with the aim of providing minimal disruption.

Of course, there are far more advanced uses and capabilities such as load sharing, shared storage, etc.

Over the next couple of months I will be experimenting with my new clustering knowledge and combining it with technologies like Xen vitalization, in the aim of developing designs for rock-solid, secure, and fault-tolerant cluster implementations, which I will release on my website.

It is certainly clear to me that Xen and clustering will change the way we run servers.

I intend to do some presentations to Wellylug about clustering and Xen over the next few months, which I will also turn into articles and make available on my website.